THE SERBS: HISTORY, MYTH AND THE RESURRECTION OF YUGOSLAVIA
By Tim Judah
350 pages, $30.00 (hardcover)
published by Yale University Press

RAPE WARFARE: THE HIDDEN GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA-HERZOGOVINA AND CROATIA
By Beverly Allen 180 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of Minnesota Press

THE BRIDGE BETRAYED: RELIGION AND GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
By Michael A. Sells 244 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of California Press

"Yugoslavia: 1989-1996"
By Warren Zimmermann, in US AND RUSSIAN POLICYMAKING WITH RESPECT TO THE
USE OF FORCE,
edited by Jeremy R. Azrael, and Emil A. Pagin
217 pages, $15.00 (paperback)
published by Rand

THE CONCEIT OF INNOCENCE: LOSING THE CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST IN THE WAR AGAINST BOSNIA
edited by Stjepan G. Mestrovic 259 pages, $34.95 (hardcover)
published by Texas A&M University Press

THIS TIME WE KNOW: WESTERN RESPONSES TO GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
By Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic
412 pages, $18.95 (paperback)
published by New York University Press

GENOCIDE: THE POLICY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
By Norman Cigar 247 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)
published by Texas A&M University Press

SLAUGHTERHOUSE: BOSNIA AND THE FAILURE OF THE WEST
By David Rieff 274 pages, $12.00 (paperback)
published by Touchstone

To the hundreds of
millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August
day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully
familiar.[1] Sunken-cheeked, hollow-eyed, their skulls shaved, their bodies
wasted and frail, they did not seem men at all but living archetypes,
their faces stylized masks of tragedy. One had thought such faces consigned
to the century's horde of images-the emaciated figures of the 1940s shuffling
about in filthy striped uniforms, the bulldozers pushing into dark ditches
great masses of lank white bodies. Yet here, a mere half century later,
in 1992, came these gaunt beings, clinging to life in Omarska and Trnopolje
and the other camps run by Serbs in northern Bosnia, and now displayed
before the eyes of the world like fantastic, rediscovered beasts.

The Germans, creators of millions of such living dead,
had christened them Muselmanner-Musulmen, Muslims. At Auschwitz, wrote
Primo Levi,

the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the
backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass...of non-men who march and labor
in silence, the divine spark dead in them.... One hesitates to call them
living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which
they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.[2]

In Omarska as in Auschwitz the masters created these
walking corpses from healthy men by employing simple methods: withhold all
but the barest nourishment, forcing the prisoners' bodies to waste away;
impose upon them a ceaseless terror by subjecting them to unremitting physical
cruelty; immerse them in degradation and death and decay, destroying all
hope and obliterating the will to live.

"We won't waste our bullets on them," a guard
at Omarska, which the Serbs set up in a former open-pit iron mine, told
a United Nations representative in mid-1992. "They have no roof. There
is sun and rain, cold nights, and beatings two times a day. We give them
no food and no water. They will starve like animals."[3]

On August 5, 1992, Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, the
first newspaperman admitted into Omarska, stood in the camp's "canteen"
and watched, stupefied, as thirty emaciated men stumbled out into the
yard, squinting at the sunlight:

...A group of prisoners...have just emerged
from a door in the side of a large rust-colored metal shed. [T]hey run
in single file across the courtyard.... Above them in an observation post
is the watchful eye, hidden behind reflective sunglasses, of a beefy guard
who follows their weary canter with the barrel of his heavy machine gun.

Their...heads [are] newly shaven, their clothes baggy
over their skeletal bodies. Some are barely able to move. In the canteen,...
they line up in obedient and submissive silence and collect...a meager,
watery portion of beans....

They are given precisely three minutes to run from
the shed, wait for the food and gulp it down, and run back to the shed.
"Whoever didn't make it would get beaten or killed," a prisoner identified
only as Mirsad told Helsinki Watch investigators. "The stew we were given
was boiling hot...so we all had 'inside burns.' The inside of my mouth was
peeling."[4]

Vulliamy and his colleagues stand and gaze at the creatures
struggling to wolf down the rations:

...[T]he bones of their elbows and wrists
protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which
their arms have been reduced. Their skin is putrefied, the complexions...have
corroded. [They] are alive but decomposed, debased, degraded, and utterly
subservient, and yet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with [what]
looks like blades of knives.

It is an extraordinary confrontation, this mutual
stare: Vulliamy and his colleagues are reporting from inside a working concentration
camp. All the while, though, Serb guards in combat fatigues, cradling AK-47s
and bearing great military knives sheathed at their hips, trudge heavily
about the room, their eyes glaring above their beards.

Vulliamy moves forward
to speak to a "young man, emaciated, sunken-eyed and attacking his watery
bean stew like a famished dog, his spindly hands shaking," but the fellow
stops him: "I do not want to tell any lies," he says, "but I cannot tell
the truth." It is an eloquent comment: most of these Muselm Anner prove
"too terrified to talk, bowing their heads and excusing themselves by
casting a glance at the pacing soldiers, or else they just stare, opaque,
spiritless, and terrified."

The reporters ask to see the hospital and receive a
curt refusal. Nor may they look inside that white building-the White House,
the prisoners call it-or the great "rust-colored shed" from which the
men had come, squinting at the August sun.

Later, survivors describe the shed as "a vast human
hen coop, in which thousands of men were crammed for twenty-four hours
a day..., living in their own filth and, in many cases, dying from asphyxiation."
So tightly were prisoners packed together in the stifling, airless heat,
"Sakib R." tells Vulliamy, that lying down was impossible and some lost
consciousness standing up, collapsing one against another.

I [counted] seven hundred that I could
actually see [around me]. A lot of people went mad...: when they went
insane, shuddering and screaming, they were taken out and shot.

Though guards at Omarska and other camps shot many
prisoners, this was by no means the preferred method. If Auschwitz's killing
tended to be mechanized and bureaucratized, Omarska's was emotional and
personal, for it depended on the simple, intimate act of beating. "They
beat us with clubs, bats, hoses, rifle butts," one survivor told a Helsinki
Watch interviewer. "Their favorite was a thick rubber hose with metal on
both ends." They beat us, said another, "with braided cable wires" and with
pipes "filled with lead."

Next to the automatic rifle, next even to the knife
(which was freely used at Omarska), the club or the pipe is exhausting,
time-consuming, inefficient. Yet the guards made it productive. A female
prisoner identified only as "J" told Helsinki Watch investigators:

We saw corpses piled one on top of another....
The bodies eventually were gathered with a forklift and put onto trucks-usually
two large trucks and a third, smaller truck. The trucks first would unload
containers of food, and then the bodies would be loaded [on].... This
happened almost every day-sometimes there [were]...twenty or thirty-but
usually there were more. Most of the deaths occurred as a result of beatings.[5]

One survivor interviewed by United Nations investigators
estimated that "on many occasions, twenty to forty prisoners were killed
at night by 'knife, hammer, and burning.' He stated that he had witnessed
the killing of one prisoner by seven guards who poured petrol on him, set
him on fire, and struck him upon the head with a hammer." All prisoners
were beaten, but according to the UN investigators, guards in all the camps
meted out especially savage treatment "to intellectuals, politicians, police,
and the wealthy."[6] When four guards summoned the president of the local
Croatian Democratic Union, Silvije Saric, along with Professor Puskar from
nearby Prijedor, for "interrogation," the female prisoner testified,

I heard beating and yelling.... At times
it sounded as if wood were being shattered, but those were bones that
were being broken.

...When they opened the door ..., they started yelling
at us, "Ustasa slut, see what we do to them!" ...I saw two piles of
blood and flesh in the corner. The two men were so horribly beaten that
they no longer had the form of human beings.[7]

Apart from obvious differences
in scale and ambition, it is the Serbs' reliance on this laborious kind
of murder that most strikingly distinguishes the workings of their camps
from those of the German death factories. At many of the latter, healthy
arrivals would work as slaves until they were reduced to being Muselm Anner;
death came when camp bureaucrats judged them no longer fit to provide any
useful service to the Reich. The gas chambers-routinized, intentionally
impersonal means of killing-had evolved partly out of a concern for the
effect that committing mass murder would have on troops, even on men specially
trained to do it. As Raul Hilberg observed,

The Germans employed the phrase Seelenbelastung
("burdening of the soul") with reference to machine-gun fire...directed
at men, women, and children in prepared ditches. After all, the men that
were firing these weapons were themselves fathers. How could they do this
day after day? It was then that the technicians developed a gas van designed
to lessen the suffering of the perpetrator.[8]

And even within the camps themselves, SS officers
worried that violence and sadism would demoralize and corrupt their elite
troops. "The SS leaders," Wolfgang Sofsky writes,

were indifferent to the suffering of
the victims, but not to the morale of their men. Their attention was aroused...by
the sadistic excesses of individual tormenters. As a countermeasure, camp
brothels were set up, and the task of punishment was delegated to specially
selected prisoners. The leadership also transferred certain thugs whose
behavior had become intolerable. [Emphasis added.][9]

At Omarska such men would have been cherished; the
out-and-out passion with which a guard administered beatings and devised
tortures could greatly bolster his prestige. Acts of flamboyant violence,
publicly performed, made of some men celebrities of sadism. In his memoir
The Tenth Circle of Hell, Rezak Hukanovic-a Muslim who was a journalist
in Prijedor before he was taken to Omarska-describes how guards responded
when a prisoner rejected the order to strip and stood immobile amid the
cowering naked inmates:

The guard...fired several shots in the
air. The man stood stubbornly in place without making the slightest movement.
While bluish smoke still rose from the rifle barrel, the guard struck
the clothed man in the middle of the head with the rifle butt, once and
then again, until the man fell. Then the guard...moved his hand to his
belt. A knife flashed in his hand, a long army knife.

He bent down, grabbing hold of the poor guy's hair....
Another guard joined in, continuously cursing. He, too, had a flashing
knife in his hand.... The guards [used] them to tear away the man's
clothes. After only a few seconds, they stood up, their own clothes
covered with blood....

...The poor man stood up a little, or rather tried
to, letting out excruciating screams. He was covered with blood. One
guard took a water hose from a nearby hydrant and directed a strong
jet at [him]. A mixture of blood and water flowed down his...gaunt,
naked body as he bent down repeatedly, like a wounded Cyclops...; his
cries were of someone driven to insanity by pain. And then Djemo and
everyone else saw clearly what had happened: the guards had cut off
the man's sexual organ and half of his behind.

Hukanovic's memoir (in
which he writes about himself in the third person as Djemo) and the testimony
of other former prisoners overflow with such horror. Reading them, one feels
enervated, and also bewildered: What accounts for such unquenchable blood-lust?
This is a large subject, to which I shall return; but part of the answer
may have to do with the elaborate ideology that stands behind Serb objectives
in the war. In order to achieve a "Greater Serbia," which will at last bring
together all Serbs in one land, they feel they must "cleanse" what is "their"
land of outsiders. Founding-or rather reestablishing-"Greater Serbia" is
critical not only because it satisfies an ancient historical claim but because
Serbs must protect themselves from the "genocide" others even now are planning
for them.

In this thinking, such genocide has already begun-in
Croatia, in Kosovo, in Bosnia itself: anywhere Serbs live but lack political
dominance. As many writers, including Michael Sells and, especially, Tim
Judah, point out, such ideas of vulnerability and betrayal can be traced
far back in Serbia's past, and President Slobodan Milosevic, with his
control of state radio and television, exploited them brilliantly, building
popular hatred by instilling in Serbs a visceral fear and paranoia.

Administering a beating is a deeply personal affirmation
of power: with your own hands you seize your enemy-supposedly a mortally
threatening enemy, now rendered passive and powerless-and slowly, methodically
reduce him from human to nonhuman. Each night at Omarska and other camps
guards called prisoners out by name and enacted this atrocity. Some of
their enemies they beat to death, dumping their corpses on the tarmac
for the forklift driver to find the next morning. Others they beat until
the victim still barely clung to life; if he did not die, the guards would
wait a week or so and beat him again.

For the Serbs it was a repeated exercise in triumph,
in satisfying and vanquishing an accumulated paranoia. As Hukanovic makes
clear in his account of the first time his name was called out, this torture
is exceedingly, undeniably intimate-not simply because force is administered
by hand but also because it comes very often from someone you know:

"In front of me," the [bearded, red-faced]
guard ordered, pointing to the White House.... He ranted and raved, cursing
and occasionally pounding Djemo on the back with his truncheon....

...The next second, something heavy was let loose
from above, from the sky, and knocked Djemo over the head. He fell.

...Half conscious, sensing that he had to fight to
survive, he wiped the blood from his eyes and forehead and raised his
head. He saw four creatures, completely drunk, like a pack of starving
wolves, with clubs in their hands and unadorned hatred in their eyes.
Among them was the frenzied leader, Zoran Zigic, the infamous Ziga....
He was said to have killed over two hundred people, including many children,
in the "cleansing" operations around Prijedor.... Scrawny and long-legged,
with a big black scar on his face, Ziga seemed like an ancient devil
come to visit a time as cruel as his own....

"Now then, let me show you how Ziga does it,"
he said, ordering Djemo to kneel down in the corner by the radiator,
"on all fours, just like a dog." The maniac grinned. Djemo knelt down
and leaned forward on his hands, feeling humiliated and as helpless
as a newborn....

Ziga began hitting Hukanovic on his back and head
with a club that had a metal ball on the end. Hukanovic curled up trying
to protect his head. Zigic kept hitting him, steadily, methodically, cursing
all the while.

The drops of blood on the tiles under
Djemo's head [became] denser and denser until they formed a thick, dark
red puddle. Ziga kept at it; he stopped only every now and then...to fan
himself, waving his shirt tail in front of his contorted face.

At some point a man in fatigues appeared.... It was
Saponja, a member of the famous Bosna-montaza soccer club from Prijedor;
Djemo had once known him quite well.... "Well, well, my old pal Djemo.
While I was fighting..., you were pouring down the cold ones in Prijedor."
He kicked Djemo right in the face with his combat boot. Then he kicked
him again in the chest, so badly that Djemo felt like his ribs had been
shattered...Ziga laughed like a maniac...and started hitting Djemo again
with his weird club....

Djemo received another, even stronger kick to the
face. He clutched himself in pain, bent a little to one side, and collapsed,
his head sinking into the now-sizable pool of blood beneath him. Ziga
grabbed him by the hair...and looked into Djemo's completely disfigured
face: "Get up, you scum...."

Then Ziga and the other guards forced Djemo to smear
his bloody face in a filthy puddle of water.

..."The boys have been eating strawberries
and got themselves a little red," said Ziga, laughing like a madman....
Another prisoner, Slavko Ecimovic,...was kneeling, all curled up, by the
radiator. When he lifted his head, where his face should have been was
nothing but the bloody, spongy tissue under the skin that had just been
ripped off.

Instead of eyes, two hollow sockets were filled with
black, coagulated blood. "You'll all end up like this, you and your
families," Ziga said. "We killed his father and mother. And his wife.
We'll get his kids. And yours, we'll kill you all." And with a wide
swing of his leg, he kicked Djemo right in the face....

In early April 1992,
little more than a week after officers of the newly christened Bosnian Serb
Army launched their campaign of limited conquest in Bosnia, officials in
Washington began receiving reports of atrocities, among them mass executions,
beatings, mutilations, and rape. Jon Western, at the State Department, then
working on human rights in Bosnia, recalls that

many of these atrocities looked an awful
lot like what we had heard and read about during World War II-the Balkans
historically produce a lot of disinformation-and we were trained to look
at them critically and decipher what was real. But as reports continued
to come in..., it became apparent that they weren't just propaganda.

In fact, we were getting reports from a number of
sources: eyewitnesses who had been incarcerated in concentration camps
begin filtering out in summer 1992 and began giving accounts of atrocities
that we could cross-reference with those from other eyewitnesses....[10]

As the Serbs prosecuted their "lightning campaign"-the
Bosnian Serb Army of eighty thousand men, which had come fully equipped
from the Yugoslav National Army, conquered 60 percent of Bosnian territory
in scarcely six weeks-State Department officials compiled testimony of increasingly
shocking and gruesome atrocities. Jon Western recalls that children were
"systematically raped":

There was one account that affected me:
a young girl was raped repeatedly by Serb paramilitary units. Her parents
were restrained behind a fence and she was raped repeatedly and they left
her in a pool of blood and over the course of a couple of days she finally
died, and her parents were not able to tend to her; they were restrained
behind a fence. When we first heard this story, it seemed very hard to
believe but we heard it from a number of eyewitnesses ...and it became
apparent there was validity to it.

Western and his colleagues were struck not only by
the cruelty of these abuses but by their systematic nature; they very rapidly
came to understand that though the Serb soldiers and, especially, the "paramilitary"
troops responsible for "mopping up" were committing wildly sadistic acts
of brutality, often under the influence of alcohol, their officers were
making rational, systematic use of terror as a method of war. Rather than
being a regrettable but unavoidable concomitant of combat, rapes and mass
executions and mutilations here served as an essential part of it.

The Serbs fought not only to conquer territory but to
"clear" it of all traces of their Muslim or Croat enemies; or, as the
notorious Serb phrase has it, to "ethnically cleanse" what they believed
to be "their" land. Of course making use of terror in such a way is probably
as old-and as widespread-as warfare itself:

Houses and whole villages reduced to
ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible
acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind-such were the means
which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to
the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited
exclusively by Albanians.

This account is drawn from the Carnegie Endowment's
Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Cause and Conduct
of the Balkan Wars, published in 1914.[11] Substitute the word "Muslims" for
"Albanians" and the sentence could have been composed in spring or summer
of 1992. Not only was the technique of "ethnic cleansing" identical, its
purpose-"the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions"-was
clear to all.

The motive force driving Serbs to fight to achieve a
"Greater Serbia"- or "all Serbs in one country"- depends however on a
fortuitous conjunction of factors: a set of powerful historical legends
combined in a cherished nationalist myth; the advent of economic hardship
and the uncertainty brought on by the end of the cold war; and the rise
of an ambitious, talented, and ruthless politician.

On the nationalist myth in particular Tim Judah writes
splendidly, briefly describing the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, and discussing
its transformation into the founding epic of the Serbian "exile." The
story he tells does much to explain both the Serb obsession with the treachery
of outsiders and their quasi-religious faith in the eventual founding,
or rather reestablishment, of the Serbian state.

It was at Kosovo that King Lazar and his Serb knights
rode boldly out to take the field against the Turks under Sultan Murad
and defend Europe against the infidel. The Serbs lost this battle-although,
as Judah shows, the evidence for this is ambiguous, as it is for much
of the story; they later came to blame the defeat on the (probably imaginary)
treachery of Vuk Brankovic, one of Lazar's favorite knights. As Petar
Petrovic-Njegos, prince-bishop of Montenegro, wrote in his 1847 epic The
Mountain Wreath:

Our Serbia chiefs, most miserable cowards,
The Serbian stock did heinously betray. Thou, Brankovic, of stock despicable,
Should one serve so his fatherland, Thus much is honesty esteem'd.

Judah argues that the
"myth of treachery was needed as a way to explain the fall of the medieval
state, and it has powerful seeds of self-replications contained within it,"
which have sprouted into an obsession with betrayal. (During the 1991-1995
war, Judah notes, with "monotonous regularity losses were always put down
to secret deals-and treachery.")

In the last supper the night before the battle, Brankovic
plays Judas to Lazar's Christ; in causing the Serbs to lose the battle,
and thus their country, to the Turks, Brankovic's betrayal made way for
the crucifixion of the Serb homeland itself. But, as Judah writes, Lazar's

"idea that it is better to fight honourably
and die than to live as slaves" not only "provided for Serbs an explanation
for their oppression by the Ottomans,"

it also identified the whole nation with the central
guiding raison d'etre of Christianity: resurrection. In other words Lazar
opted for the empire of heaven, that is to say truth and justice, so that
the state would one day be resurrected. An earthly kingdom was rejected
in favor of nobler ideals-victim hood and sacrifice-and this choice is to
be compared with the temptations of Christ.

As Jesus would be resurrected so Lazar would be: and
so, as well, would Serbia. This becomes a holy certainty, premised on
the Serbs' heroism and their sacrifice in losing to the Turks. "That is
what people mean when they talk about the Serbs as a 'heavenly people,'"
Zarko Korac, a psychology professor at Belgrade University, tells Judah.

In this way the Serbs identify themselves
with the Jews. As victims, yes, but also with the idea of "sacred soil."
The Jews said "Next year in Jerusalem" and after 2000 years they recreated
their state. The message is: "We are victims, but we are going to survive."

Milosevic himself exploits this powerful ideological
view of history-Professor Korac believes that for most Serbs "it is not
a metaphor, it is primordial"-as a motivating force; but he has not let
it limit his own tactical flexibility. Judah rightly emphasizes that Milosevic
plainly did not always believe armed conquest and ethnic cleansing central
to carrying out his project in Bosnia, for example. Well before the Bosnians
declared independence and war broke out in the spring of 1992, Milosevic
tried hard to woo Bosnia into remaining in what was left of the Federation-which,
of course, Slovenia and Croatia having seceded (and the Serbs of the Krajina
now "liberated" from Croatia and loosely tied to Serbia), was now politically
dominated by the Serbs.

The Bosnians referred to Milosevic's planned state derisively
as "Serboslavia" and it is no wonder they wanted no part of it; but the
Serb leader's tenacious attempts to persuade the Bosnians not to follow
the Slovenians and Croatians in seceding show him to be much more a ruthless
political tactician than an ideologue, a distinction he would confirm
by his behavior four years later when he abandoned to the "ethnic cleansing"
of the Croatian army the very Krajina Serbs his National Army made such
a show of "liberating" in 1991.

In the event, though, and not surprisingly, Bosnia would
not be wooed. Although its inexperienced leader, Alija Itzetbegovic, understood
the danger of declaring independence-his nascent state, a third of whose
people were Serb, might instantly collapse in war-his desperate proposals
(offered jointly with the Macedonian president) to make of Yugoslavia
a loose confederation were hardly of interest to Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia.
Slovenia, a small, prosperous republic with few Serbs and therefore of
no real importance to Milosevic, was determined to secede, and once the
Slovenes departed, the Croats were bound to follow (in fact, both republics
seceded from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991).

This left the Bosnians
with a stark choice: either passively sink into a reconfigured Yugoslavia
dominated by Milosevic and the Serbs, or declare independence and pray
that the world would recognize the new country and somehow protect it
from the onslaught to come. Itzetbegovic chose the latter, imploring the
"international community" to recognize his new country and to send United
Nations monitors to patrol its territory and prevent the war he knew would
come. After a referendum on independence was duly held in February 1992
(which the Bosnian Serbs boycotted), the "international community" in
early April recognized Bosnia as a sovereign state, and gave it a seat
at the United Nations. But sending troops to protect the new state, even
lightly armed "monitors," was a different matter. According to John Fox,
a regional official on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff at
the time,

The French came to the [Bush] administration
at very senior levels...once in the early phase of Belgrade's attack on
Croatia, and at least once well before the military campaign against Bosnia,
and they made a proposal to join with the United States, and other willing
states, to put preventive peace-keepers on the ground across Bosnia-to
support the legitimate elected government of Bosnia, to stabilize and
prevent the outbreak of conflict, and to see Bosnia through that transition
process to becoming a new independent state.[12]

One might consider the proposal to dispatch peacekeeping
troops as either a relatively inexpensive way to prevent what seemed an
inevitable and possibly horrendous war, or as a risky initiative that would
involve Americans in a situation that didn't have a clear "exit strategy."
In any case, Fox says, "the French never got a very clear answer." His office,
the Policy Planning Staff, had proposed that the Americans join the French;
but "that proposal was not accepted."

Itzetbegovic would be given no "peace keepers"; but
after all he had international recognition. The Serbs were not impressed.
"Milosevic couldn't care less if Bosnia was recognized," a laughing Dr.
Karadzic later told a television interviewer. "He said, 'Caligula proclaimed
his horse a senator but the horse never took his seat. Itzetbegovic may
get recognition but he'll never have a state.'" Karadzic, the self-proclaimed
leader of the Bosnian Serbs, now declared, in a famous speech during the
waning days of the integral Bosnian parliament in Sarajevo, "I warn you,
you'll drag Bosnia down to hell. You Muslims aren't ready for war-you'll
face extinction."[13]

He was right. By the time Cyrus Vance, the United Nations
negotiator, concluded the ceasefire in Croatia on January 2, 1992, thousands
of Serb troops were heading for Bosnia in their tanks and armored personnel
carriers. On May 5, all soldiers and officers of the Yugoslav National
Army (JNA) who came from Bosnia were taken out of the main force, complete
with their equipment, and officially became a "Bosnian Serb Army" of more
than eighty thousand fully trained men. Over the objections of the Bosnian
government in Sarajevo, the Serb forces took up strategic positions around
the country, clearly preparing for war. Jerko Doko, then Bosnia's minister
of defense, explained in testimony at The Hague that

this could be seen by the deployment
of units; the control of roads by the JNA; the relocation of artillery
on hill tops around all the major cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina; their
collaboration with extremist forces of the [Bosnian Serbian Democratic
Party], arming them and assisting the arming of them.

But Belgrade retained control. "We promised to pay
all their costs," said Borislav Jovic, then a close aide of Milosevic's.
It was not, he said, as if the Bosnian Serbs had their own state budget
to draw on. "They couldn't even pay their officers." Doko remembers the
National Army commander, General Blagoje Adzic, visiting troops near Banja
Luka and Tuzla toward the end of March 1992 in order to check their preparedness
for the coming combat operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As for the Bosnians, they were, as Karadzic said, unprepared
for war. "Before the fighting," David Rieff writes in Slaughterhouse,
"Alija Itzetbegovic insisted there could be no war because one side-his
own-would not fight. To have imagined that carnage could have been averted
for this reason was only one of the many culpably naive assumptions the
Bosnian presidency made."

The Serb leaders, on the other hand, could not have
been more prepared. During the last few years a group of selected senior
officers had secretly developed a military strategy to guide the "Bosnia
Serb Army" in its campaign to seize control of most of Bosnia. The objectives
were in turn based on ideological claims of Serb vulnerability, Serb suffering,
and Serb destiny that virtually every Serb who read a newspaper, listened
to the radio, or watched television would by now know by heart.

The center of the ideology remained, as it had for six
centuries, the redemption of the defeat at Kosovo. In 1889, on the 500th
anniversary of the battle, Serbia's foreign minister declared that the
Serbs had "continued the battle in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries when they tried to recover their freedom through countless uprisings."
As Judah notes, Milosevic himself would make use of this occasion a century
later to invoke "Lazar's ghost" to come to the Serbs' aid.

By this time, Milosevic
was making use of an ideological program, drawn up by Serbian intellectuals,
that came to be called "the Memorandum," a kind of quasi-sociological
rendition of the Lazar legend. In September 1986, extracts from this document,
which was drafted by sixteen eminent economists, scientists, and historians
in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences at the suggestion of the prominent
novelist and nationalist Dobrica Cosic, had been leaked to the Belgrade
press, and (in Judah's phrase) shook "the whole of Yugoslavia" with "a
political earthquake."

In the key section entitled "Position of Serbia and
the Serbian People," the writers launch a vigorous, bitter attack on what
they call the "Weak Serbia, strong Yugoslavia" policy implicit in the
"injustices" of Tito's 1974 constitution (which in effect "divided Serbia
in three," by making Vojvodina and Kosovo autonomous provinces; though
on Serbia's territory, they both retained a right to vote in national
government institutions).

The Serb exodus from the province of Kosovo-which, as
Judah shows, has amounted only to a relative decrease of population with
respect to the Albanians-the writers repeatedly describe as "the genocide
in Kosovo." The shift in population in Kosovo-which results from "a physical,
moral and psychological reign of terror"-together with the economic and
legal "hardships" all Serbs suffer daily, "are not only threatening the
Serbian people but also the stability of Yugoslavia as a whole."

In the Federation's "general process of disintegration,"
the academicians wrote, the Serbs "have been hit hardest" and in fact
the country's difficulties are "directed towards the total breaking up
of the national unity among the Serbian people." Observing that 24 percent
of all Serbs live outside the Serbian Republic and more than 40 percent
outside of so-called "inner Serbia," the writers declare:

A nation which after a long and bloody
struggle regained its own state, which fought for and achieved a civil
democracy, and which in the last two wars lost 2.5 million of its members,
has lived to see the day when a Party committee of apparatchiks decrees
that...it alone is not allowed to have its own state. A worse historical
defeat in peacetime cannot be imagined.[14]

The roots of Milosevic's, and Karadzic's, ideological
campaigns are all here: the near-hysterical sense of historical grievance
and betrayal, the resentment over Serbia's "inferior political position,"
the heightened rhetoric about the "genocide" of the Serbs-a term used to
describe the exile of Serbs from their rightful lands but that evokes darker
suspicions of the true intentions of Serbia's betrayers.

To combat these injustices Serbs are obliged to seize
their fate in their own hands and achieve the long-awaited resurrection
of King Lazar: "the territorial unity of the Serbian people." They must
act not only to ensure their survival but to lay claim at last to an ancient
birthright: "the establishment," the Memorandum says, "of the full national
integrity of the Serbian people, regardless of which republic or province
it inhabits, is its historic and democratic right."

Dominating the newspapers, television, and radio from
the late Eighties onward, Milosevic and the other purveyors of this ideology
brilliantly exploited the insecurities and fears of a people caught in
a maelstrom of economic decline and political change. In the Serbian press
all Muslims became "Islamic fundamentalists," all Croats "Ustase." As
Norman Cigar writes in a chapter of his Genocide in Bosnia entitled "Paving
the Way to Genocide," well before the actual breakup of Yugoslavia, "influential
figures in Serbia had begun to shape a stereotypical image of Muslims
as alien, inferior and a threat to all that the Serbs held dear."

Such propaganda, fed incessantly
to a people who in many cases had been prepared for it by their own cherished
historical myths, served to transform neighbors into "the other"-outsiders,
aliens. And Milosevic did not find it difficult, in the bewildering world
of nascent popular politics, to portray a relatively new phenomenon for
Yugoslavs-the legitimate political opponent-as a mortal threat. By "isolating
the entire Muslim community," writes Cigar, such propaganda would ensure
that "any steps...taken against Muslims in pursuit of Belgrade's political
goals would acquire legitimacy and popular support."

Such "steps" were even then being prepared. During the
late 1980s a small group of officers (among them, then Colonel Ratko Mladic)
who called themselves the "military line" had begun meeting secretly with
members of Serbia's secret police.

By 1990, or perhaps a bit earlier-the timing here is
a matter of controversy-the officers had drafted what they called the
"RAM plan" which set out schemes for the military conquest of "Serb lands"
in Croatia and Bosnia. The plan was called RAM, or "FRAME"-it is not known
what the individual letters stand for-because it makes clear the boundaries,
or frame, within which the new Serbian-dominated lands will be established.
As Jerko Doko, the former Bosnian minister of defense, describes it in
his Hague testimony:

The substance of the plan was to create
a greater Serbia. That RAM was to follow the lines of Virovitica, Karlovac,
Karlobag, which we saw confirmed in reality later on with the decision
on the withdrawal of the JNA, the Yugoslav People's Army, from Slovenia
and partly from Croatia to those positions.[15]

In their plan, the officers described how artillery,
ammunition, and other military equipment would be stored in strategic locations
in Croatia and then in Bosnia, and how, with the help of the Secret Police,
local Serbian activists would be armed and trained, thereby creating "shadow"
police forces and paramilitary units in the towns of the Croatian Krajina
and throughout Bosnia. And, as early as July 1990, this is precisely what
the Army began to do. In the area of Foca, according to Doko,

The JNA had distributed among the Serb
voluntary units about 51,000 pieces of firearms and [among] SDS members,
about 23,000..., [the Army] also gave them armoured vehicles, about 400
heavy artillery pieces, 800 mortars....

The leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army would be able
to depend upon this "parallel power structure" of dedicated, often fanatical,
and now well-armed men to support their troops as they carried out their
campaign to conquer Bosnia. For "to conquer" here does not mean simply to
subdue. In Bosnia people of different religions tended to be well mixed
together; many cities in the Drina Valley, for example, adjacent to the
border of Serbia itself, contained large numbers of Muslims.

The officers confronted, then, both a demographic and
a strategic challenge. They must create a new state whose contiguous territory
bordered the Serbian motherland-and which held most of the "liberated"
Serbs. "The fact that Muslims are the majority," Karadzic said, "makes
no difference. They won't decide our fate. That is our right." Serb lands
were Serb lands, regardless of who happened to live there.

And thus came into use
"ethnic cleansing," an ancient and brutally effective technique of war
christened by the Serbs with a modern, hygienic name. In city after city,
town after town, in the spring and summer of 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army
and its commandos and paramilitary units launched their attacks in precisely
the same pattern. It was clear these operations of conquest and cleansing
were minutely, and centrally, planned. According to Vladimir Srebov, a
former Serbian Democratic Party leader who read the "RAM Plan," the officers
stipulated a vast program of ethnic cleansing the aim of which "was to
destroy Bosnia economically and completely exterminate the Muslim people."
As Srebov later told an interviewer:

The plan...envisaged a division of Bosnia
into two spheres of interest, leading to the creation of a Greater Serbia
and a Greater Croatia. The Muslims were to be subjected to a final solution:
more than 50 percent of them were to be killed, a smaller part was to
be converted to Orthodoxy, while an even smaller...part-people with money-were
to be allowed to buy their lives and leave, probably, through Serbia,
for Turkey. The aim was to cleanse Bosnia-Herzegovina completely of the
Muslim nation.[16]

This plan was not fully accomplished, although it
is astonishing to think that it might have been. With some exceptions, when
the Serbs launched their campaign on March 27, 1992, they chose as their
first objective to seize those parts of Bosnia closest to Serbia and to
the (now Serbian-controlled) Krajina, regardless of who lived there. Within
six weeks they controlled 60 percent of the country, and though they would
later increase their gains, occupying, at their strongest, some 70 percent
of Bosnia's territory-Serbs made up slightly less than a third of Bosnians-and
though the fighting and shelling and skirmishing would go on, the front
lines would not change dramatically during the next three years of the war.

When the Serb gunners began shelling cities and towns
in Bosnia, the pattern of "cleansing" emerged immediately. Army units
would form a perimeter around a town, setting up roadblocks. Messages
were sent inviting all Serb residents to depart. Then the artillerymen
would begin their work, shelling the town with heavy and light guns; if
defenders fired back, the Serb bombardment might last many days, destroying
the town and killing most of those in it; if there was no resistance,
the heavy guns might stop in a day or two. Once the town was considered
sufficiently "softened up," the paramilitary shock troops would storm
in, and the terror would begin.

Like the camp guards-whom they visited when they could
in order to take part in torturing prisoners-the paramilitary troops had
one responsibility: to administer terror. After a town had been subdued
by artillery fire the paramilitaries "mopped up." Many bore on their person
all the iconography of World War II "Chetnik" nationalists: bandoliers
across their chests and huge combat knives on their belts; fur hats with
symbols of skull and crossbones; black flags, also with skull and crossbones;
and the full beard, which, as Ivo Banac says, "in the peasant culture
of Serbia is a sign of mourning; somebody dies, one does not shave. This
was something that happened in times of war...."[17]

Often the paramilitary troops would arrive at a newly
conquered town with lists of influential residents who were to be executed;
just as often they simply shot, or stabbed, or mutilated, or raped any
resident whom they managed to find. These killers, many of whom were criminals
who had been released from prison to "reform themselves" at the front,
were attracted to the job by their virulent nationalist beliefs, by simple
sadism, and by greed. Looting Muslim houses made many of them rich.

Many of the sadistic, high-living, and colorful paramilitary
leaders became celebrities in Serbia. Zeljko Raznatovic, for example,
known as Arkan (everyone knew his Serb Volunteer Guard, by far the strongest
and best armed of the paramilitaries, as Arkan's Tigers), was a famous
criminal-a bank robber by profession who was thought to be wanted in several
European countries, in several of which he had been imprisoned and escaped.

Judah speculates that Arkan's legendary prison escapes
have owed much to his longstanding contacts with agents of an espionage
network run out of the Yugoslav Secretariat for Internal Affairs, for
whom he reputedly worked as an assassin abroad. (His day job was running
a pastry shop.) Having lately married a Serbian pop singer in a huge wedding,
Arkan now is a member of the Yugoslav parliament.

Despite their flamboyance
and seeming independence, Arkan's Tigers and the other paramilitaries-Vojislav
Seslj's Chetniks, the White Eagles, the Yellow Ants (the name is a testament
to their prowess at looting)-were creatures of the Serbian state. As Milos
Vasic, an expert on the Yugoslav military, writes, "They were all organized
with the consent of Milosevic's secret police and armed, commanded, and
controlled by its officers."

Though it is unclear how specifically the officers described
actual tactics in the RAM Plan, the similarity of atrocities committed
in town after town lends credence to Beverly Allen's assertion, in Rape
Warfare, that they debated in detail the most effective means of terror.
Allen quotes one document, "a variation of the RAM Plan, written by the
army's special services, including...experts in psychological warfare,"
that offers a chilling sociological rationale for the tactics of ethnic
cleansing:

Our analysis of the behavior of the Muslim
communities demonstrates that the morale, will, and bellicose nature of
their groups can be undermined only if we aim our action at the point
where the religious and social structure is most fragile. We refer to
the women, especially adolescents, and to the children. Decisive intervention
on these social figures would spread confusion..., thus causing first
of all fear and then panic, leading to a probable retreat from the territories
involved in war activity.

This is why Vasic calls the paramilitaries the "psychological
weapon in ethnic cleansing." The men knew that they must be brutal enough,
and inventive enough in their cruelty, that stories of their terror would
quickly spread and in the next village, says Vasic, "no one would wait for
them to come." He estimates that the paramilitaries consisted on average
of "80 percent common criminals and 20 percent fanatical nationalists."[18]

Jose Maria Mendiluce, an official of the United Nations
High Commission on Refugees, who happened to pass through Zvornik on April
9, was watching the paramilitaries "mopping up" the town, when he suddenly
realized that "the Belgrade media had been writing about how there was
a plot to kill all Serbs in Zvornik.... This maneuver always precedes
the killing of Muslims." As Michael Sells, who includes this quotation
in his The Bridge Betrayed, comments,

The national mythology, hatred and unfounded
charges of actual genocide in Kosovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had
shaped into a code: the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide.

Army gunners-some of
them positioned across the Drina in Serbia itself-targeted Zvornik and drove
its few, lightly armed defenders out in a matter of hours. Then Vojislav
Seslj and his Chetnik paramilitaries moved in.

Mendiluce watched as the soldiers and the paramilitaries
did their work:

I saw lorries full of corpses. Soldiers
were dumping dead women, children and old people onto lorries. I saw four
or five lorries full of corpses. On one bend, my jeep skidded on the blood.[19]

United Nations investigators say Seslj briefed his
Chetniks in a local hotel, reading out a list of the names of local Muslims
who were to be killed. "Milosevic was in total control," Seslj later told
an interviewer, "and the operation was planned...in Belgrade."

The Bosnian Serbs did take part. But
the best combat units came from Serbia. These were special police commandos
called Red Berets. They're from the Secret Service of Serbia. My forces
took part, as did others. We planned the operation very carefully, and
everything went exactly according to plan.26

According to the United Nations, some two thousand
people from Zvornik remain unaccounted for. As for the other 47,000 Muslims,
they were expelled, many of them forced onto the roads with only what they
wore. Zvornik, which had a thriving community of Muslims for half a millennium,
now has none.

Sometimes the cleansing was carried out more gradually.
Early in 1992, members of a small paramilitary group seized control of
Prijedor's television transmitter, thus ensuring that the town received
only programs from Belgrade-programs which, UN investigators wrote, "insinuated
that non-Serbs wanted war and threatened the Serbs." Soon Yugoslav National
Army troops, fresh from the Croatia war, began arriving in the Prijedor
area. The Army officers demanded that Prijedor's leaders permit their
troops to take up positions around the city, from which they could control
all roads to, and exits from, the district.

It was an ultimatum. The legitimate authorities
were invited for a guided sightseeing tour of two Croatian villages...which
had been destroyed and left uninhabited. The message was that if the ultimatum
was not [accepted], the fate of Prijedor would be the same. ... The ultimatum
was accepted.27

With Bosnian Serb troops guarding all roads, Prijedor
became isolated. The Serbs closed down the bus service. They required that
people have permits to visit even nearby villages. They imposed a curfew.
The telephones were often not working.

On April 30, in a swift,
well-executed coup d'etat, local Serbs seized control of Prijedor itself.
According to the United Nations investigators, the Serbs had been preparing
to seize power for at least six months, arming themselves with weapons
secretly supplied by the Army and developing their own clandestine "parallel"
administrations, including a "shadow" police force with its own secret
service.

Non-Serbs now began to lose their jobs. Policemen and
public officials were the first to be dismissed, but the purge went on
until even many manual workers had been fired. The "shadow" administrations
already long prepared by the Serbs simply took over the empty offices.

The new Serb policemen, often accompanied by paramilitaries,
began to pay visits throughout Prijedor, pounding on the doors of all
non-Serbs who held licenses to own firearms and demanding they turn them
in.

Finally, near the end of May, the local press-newspapers,
radio, and television-began to broadcast a more hysterical version of Belgrade's
propaganda, claiming that dangerous Muslim extremists were hiding around
and within Prijedor, preparing to seize the town and commit genocide against
the Serbs.

By now it had become quite clear what this accusation
heralded. Those few Muslims and Croats who still had weapons decided to
move first. As the UN investigators describe it:

On 30 May 1992, a group of probably less
than 150 armed non-Serbs had made their way to the Old Town in Prijedor
to regain control of the town.... They were defeated, and the Old Town
was razed. In the central parts of Prijedor..., all non-Serbs were forced
to leave their houses as Serbian military, paramilitary, police and civilians
advanced street by street with tanks and lighter arms. The non-Serbs had
been instructed over the radio to hang a white piece of cloth on their
home to signal surrender.

According to the UN Report, "Hundreds, possibly thousands
were killed...frequently after maltreatment." Those who survived were divided
into two groups: women, children, and the very old were often simply expelled;
as for the men, thousands were sent to Keraterm and Omarska, the two nearest
concentration camps. Although the fighting on May 30 began a general exodus
of non-Serbs-the Muslim population dropped from nearly fifty thousand in
1991 to barely 6,000 in 1993-it very quickly became clear that the Serbs
were targeting for actual deportation the elite of the city: political leaders,
judges, policemen, academics and intellectuals, officials who had worked
in the public administration, important business people, and artists. And,
after the burning of the old town, any "other important traces of Muslim
and Croatian culture and religion-mosques and Catholic churches included-were
destroyed."

On the morning of May 30, 1992, two heavily armed
soldiers came to his door and summoned him and, within hours, Rezak Hukanovic,
a forty-three-year-old father of two, broadcaster, journalist, and poet,
found himself packed into a bus with scores of other frightened men, bent
over, his head between his knees, peering out of the corner of his eye
at the tongues of flame rising from the Old City of Prijedor. He was on
his way to Omarska.

Notes

[1]Roy Gutman of Newsday broke the story of
the camps in his article on August 2, 1992; see his collection, A Witness
to Genocide (Macmillan, 1993). But it was not until August 6, when Britain's
International Television News (ITN) broadcast the first television pictures
from the camps, that President Bush found himself forced to defend his
"standoffish" policy toward the former Yugoslavia. See the first article
in this series, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," The New York Review,
November 20, 1997.

[2]Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Simon and Schuster,
1993), p. 90. Perhaps it was this apparent absence of mortal fear, recalling
the "supposed fatalism" of the Muslims, that led the SS men to coin the
nickname Musulmen; or it may have been the "swaying motions of the upper
part of the body," brought on by severe muscle atrophy, which the Germans
thought echoed "Islamic prayer rituals." See Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order
of Terror: The Concentration Camp, translated by William Templer (1993;
reprinted in translation by Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 329,
note 5.

[10]Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an interview
with ABC News, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," January 1994.

[11]Republished as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913
Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections
on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Carnegie Endowment, 1993),
p. 151.

[12]Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an interview
with ABC News, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," January 1994.

[13] See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four (UK TX
version) in The Death of Yugoslavia, Brian Lapping and Associates; Laura
Silber, consultant.

[15]Testimony of Jerko Doko, The Prosecutor v. Tadic,
case IT-94-I-T, June 6, 1996, pp. 1359-1361, in "Testimony Offered to
the International Commission for the Former Yugoslavia," The Hague, June
6, 1996.

[18]See Milos Vasic, "The Yugoslav Army and the Post-Yugoslav
Armies," in D.A. Dyker and I. Vejvoda, editors, Yugoslavia and After:
A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (Longman, 1996), p. 134.

[19] See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four in The
Death of Yugoslavia.